short stories | Johannes Punkt’s Flaskpost

6/Aug/2013

Bed Time Story

There’s a forest, dark and deep, lit only by the fluorescent fungi covering dead tree trunks. And there are mud creatures; bubbly, oozey beings, who make a special kind of tea. Sometimes, rarely, a human finds the forest. Even rarer, a human might be invited in for tea.

Ze will be instructed to take off hir clothes, and come into the mudbaths. The creatures, many-limbed and shapeless, will then start the rituals, and if the human stays throughout the whole night – the time it takes for their tea to brew – ze will drink a cuppa unlike anything ze’s ever tasted.

2 Comments

5/Aug/2013

Dignity

We die together and it is romantic. We don’t stay dead for long because you made a jarring post to your blog, and someone cared, and someone else called the emergency services. The last thing I hear before I die is a siren’s wail, which I find poetic. Elephants climb the stairs. The door is kicked in, we are rescued. I blame you. This is me blaming you, still. They tell me you puked up your insides and that there was no romance in sight, that you convulsed. It was all very undignified. There is no real dignity in love.

3 Comments

4/Aug/2013

Relentless

“I’m really not the kind of person to run away,” you claim, tightening the laces of your new white runner’s shoes. “Like, if you know me, you know that is so not me.”

I do not know you.

“I never ever go away, and I always come back.” You unfurl your fins from your torso like a set of wings. It’s a short pier and a long way down. The sea attacks the cliffs with a relentless kind of romance, the kind that’s not problematic in works of fiction. You sigh. “But I have to do this.”

You disappear.

6 Comments

3/Aug/2013

Sculptures

A giant boulder on its edge, barely touching the sand. A rickety pole made of smaller stones like vertebrae, with a behemoth skull on top. Cacti wearing hats of lightning-shaped fulgurite, gently spinning. These wastelands are filled with improbably balancing or hovering things. I have been studying a pendulum made from broken hourglasses, and the way it swings. It is unbothered by the wind, but I know that if I touch it, like with all the other sculptures, it will fall down. So I draw lines in the sand under its course, and I make observations. I need to know.

Leave a comment

2/Aug/2013

Heart Attack

Her bed is about 80 centimetres above the floor; that should not be anything. When you are unable to move, an 80 centimetre fall hurts. She wakes up with a clenched jaw and she cannot really breathe. She can speak. She says, “Safeword,” into the air. Someone is doing this to her. No-one hears her. She is sweating profusely. “Safeword!” She jerks and falls off the bed, and starts to lose feeling in her toes, the lack-of-feeling crawling up her legs. “Safeword,” she whispers, and it takes as much energy as a full-lung scream. But it doesn’t work that way.

Leave a comment

1/Aug/2013

I’m So Glad We Don’t Live in This Timeline

This is the timeline where we never fuck, and each time we come close to it we are comically thwarted and thrown half a world away. I come to your city; the trains are all delayed due to weather, and we hardly have 24 minutes. You visit mine; we get shuffled around by formal events and martial laws. We both go to Krakow, but we don’t know that the other one is there until afterwards. Lastly, I find my way back to your city, we have a moment; and the door is kicked in and I’m arrested for domestic terrorism.

Leave a comment

31/Jul/2013

All the Stop Signs

All the stop signs in this town are redder, written in a different font, suggesting that the company producing them never had seen normal stop signs before. Sometimes they are placed in an entirely illogical fashion, as if the map was held the wrong way when they were placed there. There are small campaigns from small people who write letters to their town’s representative, hoping that some bored intern reads it and plucks up and talks to the politician about it. Some times kids go missing from the back of cars. The politicians have bigger things to worry about. Obviously.

Leave a comment

30/Jul/2013

Etemenanki

Today, I told someone that I love her (in a language she barely understands) in a park, in a slightly shaky voice because I hadn’t thought it out as well as I’d hoped. And she said that she loves me (in a language I have mostly forgotten), in a whisper in my ear. Surely there were other languages around us that day.

(in the bugs that kept crawling over us, between their bug pheromones)

(in the electricity between us, between nerve clusters on the surface and deeper down)

(in the stilted, blushing manner of whoever filed that public indecency charge)

2 Comments

29/Jul/2013

And Now: a Word from Our Sponsor

Eat your twin in utero; get born. Forever have a hollow feeling with you, never feel sated. Always eat, always carry your twin with you. This world is a circus, and you are the sideshow. You eat all the food you can eat, read all the books you can read. Voraciously. Line your throat with candle grease, eat more. Visit your mother in the hospital. Listen to her talk gibbously about her hunger, how you were born and how you were food. They took you away from her. Wonder now, if that was the right decision.

Eat at Olive Garden.

Leave a comment

28/Jul/2013

Dream Journal Entry #7

I was the ambassador to Portugal, where they speak a language of broken glass and smashed wristwatches. I was shaking as my predecessor looked me in the eyes and said, by way of picking long and see-through shards out from his throat, “you mustn’t die inside a dream. The body treats it all as if it’s really happening.” The last shard gone, and the innards of a mechanic watch on the floor, he walked out into the river. I woke up. There was an earthquake. There are cuts inside my mouth now. Does writing count as speaking? I woke up.

Leave a comment

Tag: short stories